Ashes
Short Fiction
Professional audio narration by Brenna Humphreys. Note: Brenna narrated an earlier version of the story, so there are some slight differences from the text. You can find Brenna on Substack here: Brenna Humphreys.
I made chicken paprikash last night. If you’re not impressed, you should be. It takes a long time to make chicken paprikash. You have to simmer the chicken bone-in for an hour, until it’s spicy hot. So spicy it fills up the kitchen and your eyes burn. Slicing onions is nothing, relatively speaking. I should know, because I made French onion soup a couple of weeks ago. From scratch. Here’s a tip you won’t find in any cookbook: never eat French onion soup as a main course—too much onion and gooey cheese will give you gas for days and one hell of a stomachache. I found that out the hard way.
I took up cooking—real cooking—last year, when I was fourteen. Right after my mom died. Pretty young to take up gourmet cooking, I guess. Pretty young to lose a mom, too.
I used to hate cooking. The year before she died, my mom was criticizing me, as she was prone to do those last few years. We were at my grandparents’ house, and she did it right in front of my Aunt Jackie and my Aunt Kathy.
“Alicia doesn’t like to cook,” she said. “Isn’t that right, Alicia?” It was an accusation. My mom believed most girls were born with some gene that made them just love to simmer and sauté, and she believed I’d been born without it.
“I actually do like to cook,” I lied. “What I don’t like is making Hamburger Helper every night for a bunch of ungrateful heathens.” The heathens were my little brothers, who weren’t so much heathens as assholes, but I didn’t want to curse in front of my aunts. This cut my mother to the quick, as it was intended to do, and she got quiet and pressed her lips together real tight. She’d embarrassed me first, but I still felt bad about what I’d said. She used to cook dinner before my dad left—she was a good cook. But after he was gone, all she did was sleep and bitch about one thing or another.
My dad left when I was ten and my three asshole brothers were seven, five, and two. The littlest one wasn’t really an asshole yet. That came later. My mom was always sick after my dad left. When I got home from school, she’d be laying on the couch or in her bedroom with a wet washcloth over her eyes and the curtains drawn tight so no light could get in.
“I’m having one of my headaches,” she’d say. “Can you make dinner?” My headaches, she always said. I never understood why she wanted to take ownership of them.
“Sure,” I’d say. Then I’d go change out of my school clothes and go into the kitchen and pull a pound of ground beef out of the fridge. It was always thawed and waiting for me. I’d start breaking it up and browning it on the stove in my mom’s big, cast-iron skillet, then add hot water and the pasta and sauce packet that came in the box. While it was cooking, I’d open a can of vegetables—green beans or peas.
I hated that cast-iron skillet because everything burned onto it and stuck, and I was also the one who was now in charge of doing the after-dinner dishes. My brothers were useless. The one time my mom made Kevin help me, he turned the garbage disposal on while my hand was in it. I was trying to retrieve a spoon. I pulled it out quick, but not quick enough. I had to get two stitches on my right index finger. After that, I told my mom I didn’t need help after all and asked for a Teflon pan for Christmas.
I didn’t like to cook when my mom was alive, but now I live with my Aunt Jackie and my Uncle Scott in San Luis Obispo, and I cook dinner a couple of times a week. Never Hamburger Helper. At first, I started cooking because I was afraid if I didn’t make myself useful, my Aunt Jackie and Uncle Scott wouldn’t want to keep me around. Aunt Jackie is my mom’s younger sister. They were born three years apart and never seemed to be particularly close, and I don’t think my Aunt Jackie feels like she owes my mom any favors, so I’m lucky to be here. Aunt Jackie and Uncle Scott don’t have any kids of their own. They certainly don’t need me messing up a good thing. But I’ll be eighteen in three more years, and then they can have their childless life back.
In the meantime, I’m on my best behavior. It sucked to move to a new town right at the beginning of high school, but I’ve been here a year now, and I have two almost-friends, and I like my history teacher, and the last thing I want is to move to another town and start all over again. Moving is awful. Not as awful as losing your entire family in one day, but it’s definitely right up there in the top five.
I like cooking now. When I’m cooking, I’m too busy reading the recipe and measuring out ingredients and trying to time it all exactly right to think about much else. Which is nice. Not to think about stuff.
My little brothers live with my Uncle Jason and my Aunt Kathy in San Rafael, two hundred and fifty miles north. Uncle Jason is my mom’s brother. Jacqueline, Jason, and my mom was the oldest. She was named Jennifer. Her mom ran away and left her when she was just a baby. But my grandpa remarried when my mom was two years old, and his new wife continued the “J” name tradition when they had two more children of their own. I guess they thought it would make my mom feel like a part of the family, but my mom never did. She seemed to feel more like Cinderella, with a new stepmom and two half-siblings she was convinced everybody liked better than her.
Anyway, Uncle Jason and Aunt Kathy already had two boys, our cousins. Aunt Kathy dropped a lot of hints when they came down to LA for my mom’s memorial service—we scattered her ashes in the Santa Monica Mountains, like she’d wanted. The whole time they were visiting, Aunt Kathy said things like, “Three more boys won’t even be noticeable,” and, “We don’t want to separate the boys.” They didn’t come right out and say it, but it was pretty clear they didn’t know what to do with a teenage girl, and nobody asked me how I felt about being separated from my brothers. If anyone had bothered to ask, I would have said, “They’re assholes, but they’re still my brothers.”
My Aunt Jackie is nice, but she works a lot. She’s a lawyer. She handles discrimination cases, which I think is pretty cool. My mom used to say Aunt Jackie thought she was hot shit because she went to law school. She used to say she could have been a lawyer too, but that my grandpa favored Jackie and Jason. She said he paid for their college but didn’t pay for her’s. I’m not sure that’s exactly how it went down.
My mom got pregnant with me and married my dad right out of high school, in that order. She always told me being a mother was the most important job there was, even more important than being President of the United States. She told me how lucky I was to have a mom because her mom left her when she was a baby. I’m pretty sure that had a lot to do with why my mom never really believed she was anything special. She was always trying to convince us she was important. I think the person she was most trying to convince was herself. She never seemed to get it, that she was important because she was our mom. We didn’t need her to be anything else.
My mom didn’t make the best choices, that’s for sure. She didn’t make any choices, really—she just took whatever life threw her way. Like my dad, for example. But we never held that against her. Anyway, I’ve lived with my Aunt Jackie for a year now, and she doesn’t seem to think she’s any more special than anyone else. Just the normal amount. And she seems grateful when I cook dinner.
We had a half day at school yesterday, so I decided to make something special. I rode my bike to the grocery store after the last bell. I used my own money and bought the groceries to make chicken paprikash and to bake a chocolate cake. First, I browned the chicken—thighs and drumsticks, like the recipe said. Then I sauteed the onions in a Dutch oven, added the broth and lots of paprika and pepper, and placed the chicken on top. Once the chicken was cooking, I mixed up the cake batter and greased and floured a cake tin. I poured the batter into the tin, then I dropped it on the counter a few times to get the air bubbles out, like my mom taught me to do. Then I put it into the oven to bake.
I’d never made chicken paprikash before—did I mention that? But I saw Jamie Oliver make it on television once, when my mom was still alive. Summer afternoons, we used to watch TV together and read books at the same time. We were born multitaskers, my mom and me. We didn’t talk much, but it was nice sitting together in the same room, reading our books, with the television on in the background. Once in awhile, one of us would stop to tell the other one about something funny that had happened in our book, or we’d both stop to see what Sami Brady was up to on Days of Our Lives.
One day, we had Jamie Oliver’s cooking show on. My mom was reading a romance novel with a shirtless guy on the cover. I don’t remember what I was reading—probably something by Judy Blume. Jamie was making chicken paprikash, and his eyes were watering, and he was cracking jokes, and it was hilarious. My mom and I stopped to watch. When he was finished and plated the food, my mom said, “That looks delicious.” Then she went back to reading her book. I never made chicken paprikash for my mom. But I decided to make it last night.
Only, a couple of things went wrong.
First of all, paprika is nothing to mess around with. It is spicy. The air in the kitchen was thick, like it was full of toxic fumes, and my eyes started watering. Way worse than Jamie Oliver’s. I opened the kitchen window, but it didn’t seem to help much, so I thought it might be a good idea to leave the room for a few minutes because I was choking at that point. But I forgot to turn the stove down to a simmer, and when I got back to the kitchen, the broth had boiled away, and the chicken had started to burn, and I realized too late I’d forgotten to set the timer for the cake, and that was burning too, and now the kitchen was rapidly filling up with a mixture of lethal blackened-chicken-and-burnt-paprika smoke and deadly charred-chocolate-cake smoke. It was so thick I could barely see.
I felt my way over to the exhaust fan on top of the stove. Only I got there too late, and the smoke alarm went off, which scared the bejeezus out of me. I jumped and knocked the Dutch oven off the stove and onto the floor, and while I was trying to turn the burner off so I could retrieve the chicken, my sleeve caught fire—I’m okay, I know how to stop, drop, and roll, but in this case, I didn’t have to. I was right next to the sink, so I turned the faucet on and stuck my arm under the cold water.
Of course, right about that time, my Aunt Jackie got home from work, and when she walked into the kitchen, she absolutely did not look grateful. In fact, she looked horrified. Steam was coming off my clothes, and there was red paprikash sauce all over the counters and ash floating down through the air and settling onto the kitchen tile. When my aunt figured out it was all show and not a lot of substance, and that I was okay and her house was not going to burn down, she didn’t look relieved. She looked like this was exactly the kind of thing that made her decide not to have kids of her own. She looked like she was wondering why the hell she had one standing in her kitchen with a scorched shirt sleeve. Her lips were tight, and she looked a lot like my mom looked the day I told her how much I hated cooking dinner for our family. For the first time, I could see they were sisters.
The smoke alarm was still going off. My aunt grabbed the broom and started waving it under the smoke alarm until it stopped chirping. While she did that, I managed to turn off the burner on the stove without setting myself on fire again. I turned off the oven too and opened the oven door to take the burnt cake out, which was a big mistake because more smoke started billowing out of the oven, and the smoke alarm started going off again. Luckily, my Aunt Jackie was still standing there in shock, right under the smoke alarm, with the broom, which was convenient. She snapped out of it and started waving the broom under the smoke alarm again, and suddenly it was quiet. Super quiet.
We stood there, looking at each other. I felt that painful lump start to grow in the base of my throat. The one that swells up and sits there choking me whenever I know I should be crying, but I can’t. My therapist says we all deal with grief differently and that someday I will probably cry about my mom, but I did not want it to be this day. Not now. I did not want to burden my aunt with a blubbering teenage girl on top of everything else, so I pulled myself together, and then I turned away from my aunt and started cleaning up the mess I’d made.
My aunt didn’t say anything. She started helping me clean up. I wanted to tell her not to help, that I’d made the mess, and I would clean it up, but honestly, I was afraid if I tried to talk, I’d start crying. So I kept quiet and knelt down and started picking chicken pieces up off the floor.
I was on my hands and knees, reaching for a drumstick that was lodged under the refrigerator, when I heard my aunt make a noise beside me—was she crying? I was afraid to look. Without moving my head, I looked over at my aunt out of the corner of my eye. Suddenly, she dropped down cross-legged onto the floor next to me, right in the middle of all that mess. Her shoulders were shaking, and I realized she was laughing. Laughing. Laughing when there was absolutely nothing funny. I felt my eyes watering again, this time not from the paprika, but because I knew I was about to start crying and there was absolutely nothing I could do to stop it.
“I miss my brothers,” I said. The words cracked and came out of my throat in a hoarse croak. My eyes were hot, and my throat was throbbing, and I couldn’t control what came next. I started crying hard, sobbing, shaking, a whole year’s worth of tears. Maybe more.
My aunt didn’t get up from the floor. She scooted closer to me, then she wrapped her arms around me and held me close and started rocking me like I was a baby.
“I know, sweetheart,” she said. “I mean, I should have known. Of course you miss your brothers.” I kept on crying. My aunt held me as long as I needed her to. She never pulled away. I loved her for that, but as much as I loved my aunt, I would have given anything to be sitting on the kitchen floor in our old house, back in LA, with my mom.
When I finally stopped crying, she said, “I’m sorry we didn’t think about arranging for you to see your brothers more often. We all get busy with the day-to-day things, and we push the most important things to the back burner.”
The back burner. I remembered what I had done and became aware of the mess we were sitting in.
“I’m sorry about the kitchen,” I said. “About dinner.”
“Oh, forget that,” Aunt Jackie said. “We’ll laugh about it someday. I mean, I was already laughing about it. I’m sorry, but I couldn’t help it. It reminded me of something.” Then she told me about the time when her and Uncle Scott were first married and she tried to make a baked Alaska to surprise him, which is a cake wrapped in ice cream then topped with meringue and baked in a hot, five-hundred-degree oven.
“Only I skipped the most important step—after you cover the cake with ice cream, you’re supposed to freeze it solid, for at least two hours. I didn’t freeze it at all, so the ice cream was too soft. And I didn’t seal it properly—when you put the meringue on, you have to make sure to seal all the edges. It was a disaster. The ice cream melted right away and dripped into the bottom of the oven and started burning. What a mess. I was cleaning sticky, burned-on globs of ice cream out of the oven for the next month.” She started laughing again—she has a nice laugh—and this time, I laughed, too. It was funny.
“We should try it,” she said. “Baked Alaska. Between the two of us, I bet we could get it right.”
“Sure,” I said. “I’d like that.” I really would.
“Have you ever thought about going to cooking school, Alicia? Becoming a chef?”
I shook my head no. A chef. Boy, would my mom be shocked to hear that.
“It’s something to consider,” my aunt said. “You’re a talented cook.” She was quiet for a moment. “Did your mom ever tell you about the time she decided she wanted to be a marine biologist and brought a dead shark home from the beach and put it in the bathtub?”
“No,” I said. “Really?” I couldn’t imagine my mom doing something like that.
“She sure did. Your grandpa was so mad.” She smiled. “Your mom was always coming up with ideas about what she wanted to be. A marine biologist or an archaeologist or a pilot. It was always something adventurous, and once she put her mind to it, that was that. She learned everything there was to learn about sharks that summer. And then it was on to the next thing. Your mom was so smart and so brave. She could have been anything she wanted to be. But I think what she most wanted to be was a mom.”
“I think so, too,” I said. “She was a really good one.”
When my Uncle Scott got home from work, my aunt and I were still sitting in the kitchen floor. That’s how he found us, with ashes in our hair and paprika all over the place, telling stories about my mom, talking so loud and laughing so hard we didn’t hear him come in. He stood there looking at us like we’d lost our minds.
“What the hell—?”
“Get changed, Scott,” my aunt said. “We’re going out for dinner.”
We went to Woodstock’s for pizza. I saw one of my friends there with her family. Then we walked downtown and got ice cream at Doc Burnstein’s. When we got home, my aunt called my Uncle Jason. They’re coming down here to visit next weekend, and we’re driving up to San Rafael next month. My aunts and uncles are coming up with a schedule, so I’ll always know when I’ll see the boys next.
I talked to my brothers on the phone—I think they miss me as much as I miss them. I promised I’d call them again on Sunday. I can’t wait to see them. I’m already planning what I’ll make for dinner while they’re here. And I’m thinking about what stories I’ll tell them, so they remember our mom. I miss her, and so do my brothers. They didn’t say it out loud, but they didn’t have to. Not to me.
Yesterday started out awful, but it turned out okay. It was nice hearing stories about my mom. I liked hearing about the things she’d wanted to be when she was growing up, even if it made me a little sad she never got to be any of those things. Maybe she would have gone back to school, if she hadn’t gotten sick. Maybe she would have become a marine biologist.
We were different, my mom and me, but we were kind of the same, too. We both liked cooking. We both liked reading books. But I’ve never thought about what I want to be when I grow up. Maybe I will go to cooking school. Or maybe I’ll be a scientist like my mom wanted to be. Or go to law school. Who knows? I’m not going to lock myself into anything just yet. There’s plenty of time for me to figure it out.
I originally wrote “Ashes” as part of California Is an Earthquake, my novel-in-collected stories coming in fall 2027 from Sibylline Press. It’s in the same universe as California Is an Earthquake, but I decided the tone was too different, and it didn’t quite fit.
I hope you enjoyed reading “Ashes.” You’ll be able to find out what happens to Alicia when my book comes out next fall. In the meantime, you can read more of my short stories and creative nonfiction here: Leanne by the Sea: Fiction and Essays.
Leanne Phillips
Writer | Book Coach | Editor
leannephillips.com
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What a moving story, Leanne.